October 2002

Personal Brief
The last few days I’ve been deep in thought. I haven’t been blogging all my deepest thoughts here though. I’m still having thoughts though. I have lots of thoughts: about divorce, weight loss, work, freelancing, work in respiratory therapy, girlfriends, old girlfriends, friendships, honesty, religion, faith, abstract emotions, love, mistakes, learning from mistakes, and much more. I do feel pretty good lately, but with a side dish of stress. I still have so much to learn from life, and I’m trying to make a go of it the best way I know how. As much as I think I’ve reached a plateau of enlightenment in the past five months, I still have much more to learn. It continues to be an interesting life, filled with love from many quarters, as well as challenges galore.

Still and all, I am a very lucky man.

    With love,
        Onward.

Culture [Warning, Adult Concepts Herein]
On October 11th I saw Stew play music at Java Joe’s in Ocean Beach. He did something unusual for him as a solo artist, as even as part of his band The Negro Problem: he played a cover. The one he played was a song I had never heard before. A remarkable number from the Rolling Stone’s Beggars’s Banquet: it’s called Stray Cat Blues. He prefaced this with the note that this album came out in 1967 or 1968 – and given that the Stones were at the time the biggest band in pop, the lyrical content of the song is unbelievably. He said it was the kind of thing that maybe R.Kelly would write about if he actually had the guts to write about what he does. The song is pretty unbelievable when you think about it. Stew was right when he shared with the audience that any artist couldn’t put out a record like this, even the hardest rapper wouldn’t dare make allusions to sexual interactions with underage girls as boldly as this song does. And yet the Stones were huge at the time. You can check the lyrics to Stray Cat Blues here.

Warms the Cockles of My Heart
Asteroid Impact Could Have Led To Nuclear War (between Pakistan and India)

QuickBooks SDK
A QuickBooks Software Development Kit is available. They’re encouraging developers to check it out.

Un-Copyright
Jon Sullivan has a fascinating copyright policy for his website. It’s fascinating inasmuch as he claims no copyright whatsoever. Read his un-copyright policy.

Bad Design For Government Agencies 101
Darpa’s Information Awareness Office has a logo which conspiracy theorists will love.

Distributed Disruptive Intelligence
The idea of Smart Mobs is really intriguing to me.

(Reminds me of the line Swarm! Swarm! from Rushmore.)

Interesting
Mormon Temples and Temple Rituals

Poli Sci Lite
Talking To Your Kids About Fascism

For Geeks Who Build Web Applications
A Guide To Building Secure Web Applications